Conservative and liberal academics are joining forces to push back against what they describe as the stranglehold of “wokeness” in the humanities.
They are publishing a sweeping manifesto calling for a new era of open inquiry in higher education, the College Fix reported.
The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science was first published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in July.
It urges the creation of “post-progressive social science” that can thrive in new universities, think tanks, or “a future academe rededicated to open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and civil discourse.”
“This peer pressure on academic freedom has constricted and warped the production of knowledge,” political science professor Eric Kaufmann told The College Fix via email.
“It has made us dumber about the social world, not smarter.”
Kaufmann, who organized the manifesto at a Heterodox Social Science conference at the University of Buckingham in June, warned that higher education had undergone a radical shift over the past two decades.
“In the second two decades of the 21st century, academic and cultural institutions were suddenly seized by a radical ideology known as Critical Social Justice, Intersectionality, the Identity Synthesis, the Successor Ideology, or most commonly, Wokeness,” Kaufmann said.
“This takeover took many by surprise and remains unexplained.
“We hold that the wokeness revolution was not compelled by new discoveries or moral imperatives but is a contingent historical episode that needs to be studied, just as scholars have sought to explain the rise of nationalism, communism, neoliberalism, and populism.”
According to Kaufmann’s Substack account of the conference, participants raised concerns about “forbidden topics or viewpoints,” including “the negative economic effects of immigration, or whether differences in family structure help to explain racial inequality.”
He described the “cultural left ideology” as having achieved “institutional hegemony” across much of academia.
The manifesto drew signatures from a diverse roster of prominent scholars, including conservative activist Christopher Rufo and liberal Harvard professor Steven Pinker, along with academics from Ivy League institutions and universities in Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Argentina.
“In signing this manifesto, we are trying to define the new social science and theories that will guide knowledge production in the post-progressive era,” Kaufmann told The College Fix.
“They disagree on how to reform higher education, but agree that we need this new, positive, research agenda.”
Kaufmann also announced the creation of a Buckingham Research Award of up to $100,000 for “post-progressive social science research” and revealed plans for his upcoming book, Post-Progressivism: Toward a New Social Science.
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